CEO of the Year

Winner

Demetra Pinsent - Charlotte Tilbury Beauty

In the last 18 months, Demetra has been heavily involved in building out a strong C-suite team to shoulder the next phase of Sequoia Capital-backed Charlotte Tilbury Beauty’s growth, hiring and onboarding a COO, CMO, CTO and CFO, alongside commercial leads for North America, UK & Middle East, Europe and APAC).

Together with Founder & CCO Charlotte Tilbury and their team, she expanded distribution into the Middle East with the opening of two stores in Kuwait and Doha and launched the brand in Hong Kong in partnership with Lane Crawford. The brand has achieved global reach in record time. She is particularly proud of the in-house technology team assembled in 6 months to further enable the company’s ambitious digital agenda.

Runners up

Justin Basini - ClearScore

ClearScore has been difficult to miss in recent months – its £275m sale to Experian has made headlines, particularly given the relative youth of the business: the figure comes out to around £11.4m of company value per month of operation.

Driving this valuation, Justin has led the company through true user scale – the company has more than doubled its active user base in the last 12/18 months to 6.5m users in the UK, generating over 2.2m active monthly users – and the development of a world-class team, which has now grown to 180 people across four continents.

Justin highlights the company’s success in South Africa: working alongside the CFO and a Chief of Staff, and shielding the rest of the business from any disruption, Justin built ClearScore’s Johannesburg team, which quickly evolved into a 400k user business, from scratch.

Ulric Jerome - MATCHESFASHION

Over the last five years, MATCHESFASHION have transformed from a buying and merchandising oriented company – making all of its sales in-store – to a global online organisation which now carries out 95% of the business online. In the same period, it has moved from being largely national to be truly international, with around 82% of transactions originating outside the UK: the United States now has MATCHESFASHION’s largest customer base.

Ulric credits this, to a significant degree, to the company’s creation of an impressive team – now standing at around 900, up dramatically from 120 five years ago. In particular, Ulric stresses that he has embedded in this expanded team a powerful set of organisational skills – allowing it to undergo the sort of scale it has experienced without losing momentum.